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Wednesday, 16 March 2016

On Tuesday I dropped into Twitter to see what people were seeing about Primary Tuesday, and got distracted immediately by a discussion that noted disability writer and advocate David M. Perry was involved in. I jumped right in uninvited, because apparently that's the kind of Twitter user I've become. I felt quite strongly about the topic once I investigated, though, which was this year's Down Syndrome Awareness Day (March 21) video from Italian Down Syndrome advocacy group CoorDown. The video is entitled "How Do You See Me?", starring AnnaRose Rubright, a 19-year-old woman with Down Syndrome, and actress Olivia Wilde:

I understand what CoorDown was trying to do with "How Do You See Me?" They were using the Olivia Wilde character, "normal"-looking and someone that anyone would expect to make those statements to get people interested, and then there's the "gotcha": the narrator isn't the Olivia Wilde character, like you assumed, but a person with Down Syndrome. How does that change things for you, CoorDown, asks? How do you see AnnaRose? What assumptions do you have about her do you need to challenge?
CoorDown's intent with "How Do You See Me?" wasn't bad. But the messaging is bad. The optics are bad. David Perry was trying to tell a CoorDown representative this yesterday, but the person wasn't very receptive.
Here are some things about the video that were problematic for me

Disabled People Shouldn't Be Required to Identify as Non-Disabled

There's an implication in "How Do You See Me?" that in order for people with Down Syndrome (and, by extension, disabled people in general) to "see" or perceive themselves as people with valued social roles, and a well-rounded personality, and dreams, and a life in the community that brings them fulfillment, they also have to self-perceive as a white, non-disabled person. Not only should it not be necessary in this day and age for disabled people to self-perceive as non-disabled in order to live like a non-person person (period...forget about skin colour), it explains why this video is drawing criticism from disability advocates everywhere.

In "How Do You See Me?" AnnaRose Looks and Sounds Like She's Waiting to Start Her Own Life

This isn't the case, by the way. AnnaRose goes to college, works at a physiotherapy clinic, and is a Special Olympics athlete.
Yet, in "How Do You See Me?", we hear her voice talking about "seeing" herself being and doing a lot of things while we watch Olivia Wilde do them.
As Crippled Scholar says:

"The video would have been far more poignant and entirely less infuriating if it had shown the narrator engaging in the activities she described rather than Olivia Wilde."

Mixed Messages in "How Do You See Me?"

The video posits, presumably unintentionally that it's better to have Olivia Wilde's face than it is to have AnnaRose's face, with the distinguishing features found in most people with Down Syndrome. For a video created for Down's Syndrome Awareness Day, by a Down Syndrome advocacy group, that sends a rather mixed message to me. Piggybacking a bit on my last point, it would have been nice to see more of AnnaRose in the video, not so much of "Olivia Wilde plays a girl with Down Syndrome" and "Olivia Wilde has Down Syndrome...", which seem to be the ways the preview for the video appears on Twitter when it's shared - without AnnaRose's name.

Bottom Line

Again, it's not that I think that CoorDown intended to film something that was problematic. But there's an implication "How Do You See Me?" that disabled people should see themselves as non-disabled simply because of an ableist assumption that non-disabled is better. And I can't get behind that, especially from a video that's supposed to raise awareness about Down Syndrome.

Saturday, 12 March 2016

Let me just preface this by saying that while I really like Bernie Sanders and have been hoping that he'll get the Democratic nomination, I don't go around trashing Hillary Clinton, either. I've been of the belief that either would make a great candidate, and that I'd support (from Canada) either of them and tell people "You need to vote for this person!" because America needs to keep a Republican out of the White House. However, even candidates that we support sometimes need to be called out on things, and Hillary Clinton needs to called out (as people have been doing, thank goodness) on remarks she made on March 11 about Nancy Reagan's record on the AIDS crisis as it emerged in America.

I'm quite concerned about them, not just because they were utter bullshit, but because I'm not sure now what to think about Hillary Clinton.

Here's some CNN commentary about Hillary Clinton's remarks to MSNBC:

Judging from reactions that I've seen yesterday and today, it's going to take a lot more than a weak apology on Twitter to undo the damage caused by her statements.

She did not "misspeak" about how Nancy Reagan handled the AIDS crisis.

She lied.

The Reagans and the AIDS Crisis - I Don't Remember, But I Learned

Hillary may think that ABC's viewers may not remember what happened when AIDS first emerged in America, but I think that she'll learn (if she hasn't already) that this isn't the case. And a whole lot of people have learned about it. I wrote an essay about it in high school, totally unprepared for what I was going to find when I began my research. What I learned from (from Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On: People, Politics, and the AIDS Epidemic", mainly) shocked me and broke my heart. I was just 18. I didn't know that governments could (or would) treat sick people that way. Writing that essay had a powerful impact on me, more so than most of the writing I've done.

Later on, I read transcripts from the era, which Mother Jones has compiled. They fleshed out a terrible history of rampant discrimination, where people died of an unknown disease and the government didn't care because it was only showing up in gay people, prostitutes, and intravenous drug users. Shame on Hillary Clinton and her revisionist history that in thirty seconds swept that ugliness under the rug and made the government sound like it was instead doing good at the time.

My Concern Now About Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's history is in general a blind spot for me. I don't know a whole lot about Benghazi, except that there were a lot of investigations that found nothing. I know a bit more about the email server issue, but not enough to explain it to someone thoroughly.

I'd been giving her the benefit of the doubt on these things and assuming her innocence. But seeing her lie so easily makes me nervous. Seeing her lie about something that's so widely known and easily disproved makes me nervous. I mean, I'm Canadian and I've known about this since I was 18.

What does it say about Hillary Clinton, and about what she actually thinks of the voters?

I'm quite thrown off by this, and not sure what to do with it.

ETA: Today, I found this article written by Hillary Clinton, on Medium...by accident. I see that it's also on her Facebook page, but I only went there to check because a comment prompted me - I've never looked at Hillary Clinton's Facebook page before today, It's entirely possible that I might have missed this article if I hadn't gone wandering on the Medium site. For that reason alone, I'm not sure what to think of it, but there are a couple of other things that leave me cold: 1) There's no apology 2) She doesn't explain *why* she said what she did, granted that she knows all this history. I actually feel like she may have dug the hope deeper with this.